The well-being of our region depends on how well we educate our citizens. While ongoing efforts toward education reform are well-intentioned and achieve some significant victories, they are only incremental successes.  In order to ensure higher and more varied academic outcomes, we must rethink some of the fundamental elements of what it means to educate all students.   

As there are now many educators, philanthropies, policymakers, and businesses committed to educational improvement, the time has come to respond differently. We need new approaches. We can and must do better.

Questions we aim to answer through our Systems Building initiative include:

• Can we improve student outcomes dramatically enough by improving current classroom models and practices rooted in familiar institutional structures?
• Should we invest in varied methods of educating students that differ dramatically from current, traditional approaches?
• What are the relative costs of various, innovative approaches to learning versus the costs of continued failure to educate enough people sufficiently?

The investments made through the Foundation’s Systems Building initiative focus on the reevaluation of current education systems in order to identify innovations, policies, and other opportunities that may lead to a dramatic increase in the number of students possessing the skills necessary to succeed in the 21st century.

While there now exists at least a partial concentration on investigating wide-reaching innovations in each of the Foundation’s initiatives, the Systems Building initiative specifically focuses on reevaluating current systems in order to best affect large-scale change.

The Foundation also supports strategies that aim to enhance public understanding of the need to reevaluate our current education systems.